


Another Morning After

by Ael_tRlailiiu



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-13
Updated: 2013-07-13
Packaged: 2017-12-19 08:30:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/881662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ael_tRlailiiu/pseuds/Ael_tRlailiiu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Immediately post-IM3, as the dust settles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Morning After

**Author's Note:**

> I just really like this kind of scene, apparently.

The taxi pulled into the hotel's shallow half-loop of a driveway. Pepper nudged Tony back to alertness and climbed out, careful of her bare feet. None of the dozen emergency vehicles that converged on what was left of the _Roxxon_ _Norco_ had carried spare footwear.

“Happy Holidays,” the driver said.

“And to you,” Pepper said, and added to Tony, “Almost there.” Brightly lit doors beckoned under a loopy neon sign. At somewhere past two o'clock on Christmas morning, the lobby stood deserted.

At the desk, a woman with graying dark hair in a fierce bun went over a stack of papers. The younger man beside her appeared glued to a computer screen. Pepper heard him say, “Supposed to be more from Ellis, but they didn't say when. I don't want to miss it.”

“It'll be tomorrow.” The woman pursed her lips. “Soonest. Man's probably going to spend the next three days under his bed.” She looked the new arrivals up and down as they limped across the lobby. “Good morning, and welcome to The Springs. Can I help you?” She may have stepped on her co-worker's foot. He startled, looked up at the two of them, and looked back at his screen. His jaw dropped.

“I hope so. We don't have a reservation.” Pepper supposed they made quite a sight. One of the EMTs had loaned her a jacket, so at least she didn't feel naked. Tony had gotten his cuts seen to, but he still looked like, well, like someone who had been through one hell of a day, and had blood on his shirt to boot. He was probably still supposed to be dead. God knew what the papers had reported about Pepper's own disappearance.

“That's quite all right, ma'am.” The woman tapped at her keyboard. Her nameplate said Ms. Vasquez (Manager). “This isn't a _luxury_ hotel, mind.” Her voice held a hint of question.

So much for not going recognized. “As long as nothing explodes, it will be an improvement. Whatever you've got is fine.”

“One caveat to that, actually,” Tony said, glancing around the lobby at furniture that hadn't been updated in fifteen years or so. “Make sure no one bothers us for, say, forty-eight hours, and if it's available for money, it's _yours._ I'll buy the building if you want. Just no press, no people, nothing.”

Pepper sighed. “Tony, we have a million things to do, we can't—”

“No. We did the things. Mom, apple pie, and the American Way are safe and sound. This is the part where we watch bad TV, fall over and don't move for twelve hours. You may be running on nitrous now, but I am on my last fume. And yes, I know, my own fault, got that memo.”

Ms. Vasquez gave them a long, thoughtful look and nodded. “I'll see what we can do to ensure that you're not disturbed.”

The other one (Mr. Thomson, Asst Manager) found his voice. “Is there, ah, any luggage?”

She and Tony exchanged a blank look. Pepper said, “No.”

“I think it's safe to say that luggage is something we no longer own. Along with pretty much anything else you can think of.” Tony tossed a credit card onto the desk. “At least for the moment. _Is_ there anything...?” He looked at Pepper.

“At the house? There might be some unexploded ordinance.”

“Ah.” He blinked. “Well—new year, fresh start.”

Vasquez handed them a pair of electronic keys. “Down the hall, last door on the left. It's in the back, so no view, but there's no one next door, and it ought to be quiet. Enjoy your stay.”

“I'm sure we'll do that.” Pepper managed a smile. “Where's your ice machine? We should put some on that knee.”

“It doesn't need ice, it needs codeine. Or something better.” He had claimed not to remember when that had happened.

Vasquez said, “Tommy, go get some ice, please.”

Still looking a bit star-struck, he nodded and headed down the opposite hall.

“Thank you,” Pepper said.

They reached the end of the row of anonymous doors. The room was dark, stationary, and not populated by anyone trying to kill them. They didn't even get around to turning on the TV.

  
  


Pepper surprised herself by sleeping for six hours. She woke up because she was starving. The generic clock on the bedside table, the mass-produced seascape on the far wall, the coarse dark weave of the curtains, all struck her as surreal. Nine-thirty would normally be sleeping in for her. She looked for her phone and remembered that she didn't have it. The handful of things that had survived the house had been in her _last_ hotel room. God knew what Killian had done with them.

She lay still to concentrate on the fact that he was dead. Next to her, Tony did a good impression of an exhausted rock. She didn't blame him for it, not after thirty-six straight hours flying, driving, or fighting. You can't really count being knocked out and tied up as “down time.”

_A bed frame? Really?_

_Yeah, I'm thinking he had even more issues than we know about, really don't want to know._

Then he had told her about Maya.

Pepper felt sleep recede beyond her reach and gave up trying. She sat up and ran curious hands over her arms, faced the unmarked reality of her own skin, skimmed over memories like someone inching into cold water. Living through things wasn't the hard part. It was going to the funerals, replacing what had broken, knowing herself. She wasn't sorry about Aldrich. He had killed all of those people for no other reason than he thought the world owed him better than he had gotten.

She got up, found the room service menu and ordered one of everything with protein, plus “a gallon of orange juice, literally, I'm serious.” Last night had probably burned a lot of calories. She ought to be dead.

A knock on the door startled her. Heat surged down her arms. Pepper spent a panicky moment getting herself under control and realized in doing so that she didn't have any clothes on. She dragged the duvet off the bed (Tony turned over) and went to the door.

“Yes?” Mindful of the last time she had answered a knock, she left the security latch in place.

“It's Janet Vasquez. The hotel manager,” the woman added.

“Oh. Yes?”

“Your breakfast is on the way. I pulled together a few things you might be able to use.” She lifted a shopping bag into view. “No offense, but I gather from the news that you're temporarily short of, well, things.”

“That's a good way to put it.” Pepper wrestled with the latch on the door one-handed and accepted the bag. “And that's very kind of you.”

“We've gotten a lot of calls. Either your cabbie talked, or someone must have seen you in the area. We're putting them off so far, and I've got an extra shift of security people on call.”

“Thank you.” She didn't like hiding. She also had to admit that they weren't in any shape to face the outside world when she had to answer the door in a blanket. “We'll get out of your hair as soon as we can.”

“Take your time.” Janet had a small smile, one that didn't maybe get used much. “I had to guess on the sizes, but your fellow looks about the same size as Tommy's.”

“Ah...?” She glanced at the bag, which did seem heavy for what she had assumed might be a few extra toiletries. Those were included, but so were some actual clothes, tags still attached. “You didn't have to do all this.”

“It's nothing much.” Janet waved off the sentiment. “I lost my house in Hurricane Andrew. It takes a while to get past something like that, money or no. And it's difficult to shop for shoes if you're not wearing any, yes?” She gave a brisk nod and strode back down the hall.

By the time Tony woke up, Pepper was dressed in a t-shirt and sweatpants that were slightly too big, but clean and untainted by any of the previous day's experiences. She sat reading the last pages of their complimentary newspaper in a sliver of daylight near the window.

“Is there bacon?” he asked from under the blanket.

“I ate it all. I can order some more.”

“ _You_ ate bacon?” Tony poked his head out to squint at her.

“I was really hungry.”

“I suppose that would follow.” He turned over. “Ow.”

She got up and went over to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Why are you wearing clothes?” he asked.

“It's a thing people do. Also, our hotel manager is pushing for sainthood and made a run to the local Wal-Mart on our behalf.”

“You should not be wearing clothes right now.”

She snuggled down next to him. “Better?” Post-crisis SOP, this aggressively ordinary tone, this physical check-in. _You're here; I'm here._ No one had warned her that once her baseline for normal had been so definitively reset, it would never go back.

“Better.” He slid a hand under her shirt and stopped with a perplexed look.

“You're not misremembering. No more appendectomy scar,” she said. “Wish you could say the same.” She had never seen him looking quite this chewed up.

“It'll heal.” A moment passed. He half-turned over to look at her. “Pepper—”

She put a finger to his lips. “Don't. This isn't your fault. From what he said while I was... there, believe me, Killian had a _list_. Never mind that 'just doing business' attitude. He would have gotten around to me eventually if I had never met you. And to everyone else who ever turned him down or snubbed him or got ahead of him with thirteen items in the express lane.”

“Could be. You are the most amazing person I have ever known. And I know a _lot_ of people.”

“Thanks.” She smiled. “And you have your moments.”

“When I'm not being a jerk?”

“Exactly.” He was ridiculous, and she loved him.

She hadn't heard him laugh in a while.

  
  


They heard voices in the hall a few times, and the room phone rang until they unplugged it. They left the curtains drawn and didn't move much from the bed except to eat and eventually to clean up.

By the time Tony got out of the shower he was moving less stiffly, though his bruises from the crash-landing in Tennessee were spectacular. Pepper sat cross-legged on the carpet, burning holes in pieces of hotel paper with her fingertip.

“Now this,” she said. “ _This_ is weird.” She hadn't asked for this. She couldn't help but think at the same time that she understood things now that she couldn't before, about un-wished for metamorphoses. “How did you not go crazy?”

“Um... did you miss the part where I kind of am?” He wrapped the towel around his waist and looked worried at her.

“I meant in Afghanistan. Before all of this.” Back when she had worried endlessly that he might be going crazy, but instead had been doing something quite different. “And you're not crazy. Anxiety is actually a really sane reaction to this sort of thing, if you think about it..”

“If you say so. Back then? Being really pissed off helped, I guess. And....”

He paused for so long that she looked up at him, worried, but it was just his _grappling with things he didn't like to talk about_ look, nothing worse.

“I don't think I would have walked out of there if I'd been alone the whole time. And yeah, afterward? It's weird as hell when everything else is the same and you're not.”

“Well. That's one problem I don't have.” She got up and left the singed paper on the floor, ready for a change of topic.

“We'll figure this out. We've got all their data, and it looks like they actually kept good records..”

“Right.” She took a breath. “We can't stay in here forever, you know.”

“You sure? It's quiet, and no one is shooting at us.” He sprawled onto the bed with hardly even a wince. “There's some good restaurants in Miami. A little snug, maybe....”

Pepper swatted his good knee. Maybe it was time to say it. “I _liked_ that house.”

“I know. So did I.”

She leaned back against the headboard next to him and looked at the hideous seascape, then down at Tony. “I'm sorry about DUM-E and U.”

“Machines can be fixed. All of your books.”

“Those dead trees you're always telling me to get rid of? I can buy new ones.”

“You've had some of those for ages.”

She had been lugging some of the art history from home to home since college. “Your concert t-shirts.”

“That's what eBay is for. Dad's Roadster,” he said, which was not so much tearing off the Band-Aid as ripping out the stitches.“So where should we go?”

“To stay? I don't know.” New York being out of the question. “The place certainly did have a lot of memories.”

“Yep. Hey, maybe it'll be good to move.”

She let the silence stay a moment before asking, “I didn't want to ask you last night—are you seriously planning to... I don't know, retire?”

He looked up at her with those ludicrous brown eyes. “Why, would it bug you?”

She gave him a wry half-smile. “I tried to argue with you about this once. I learned my lesson. Do what makes you happy.”

“Hm.” He drummed his fingers on the reactor casing, a short tattoo. “We'll see. The world can handle itself for a while. Priority one is you.”

Pepper decided to let that stand. “There are more of them, aren't there.”

“Extremis? Probably.” He looked at her sidelong. “This is your way of saying that we've had enough lazing around, isn't it.”

“Afraid so.”

“All right.” He grinned at her. “Let's go shopping and have a press conference. Correct whatever horrible things Rhodey has been saying about me.”

END

  
  



End file.
